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A new consuming philosophy: Reuse, remake, refrain

7/23/2013

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PicturePhoto: Stock Unlimited (1916164)
Companies like Yerdle advocate for collective consumerism or a sharing economy, as reported in the Los Angeles Times.  Yerdle allows people to offer goods they no longer use to friends, while other companies are focusing on extending the useful lifetime of goods or make them from scrap materials.

"Our whole retail model over the last 50 years has focused on keeping the industrial machine churning out items," said Ruben, who until 2007 had an up-close view as the head of sustainability at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the king of mass-produced goods. "But if my friend already has shinguards that he's not using, I don't need to buy them for myself."
​
...Instead of trying to shrink a product's environmental footprint from the production side by making it with less material, advocates — especially clothing and shoe companies — are trying to extend its usefulness on the consumer end.

Retailers such as Hello Rewind are selling goods and products reworked from discarded scraps. Textile makers are experimenting with longer-lasting fabrics. Some businesses are asking shoppers to scale back their buying.

"It fits perfectly with the new movement toward sustainability in the fashion industry," said British designer Orsola de Castro, whose From Somewhere brand is considered an eco-apparel pioneer. "Hyper production and the sheer availability of cheap clothing has made us forget the value of maintaining and repurposing clothes and textiles."
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Litterati: Cleaning Up Litter With Instagram

7/23/2013

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PictureImage: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
Literati.org is on a mission to eradicate litter by crowdsourcing trash pickup, archiving the results in its Digital Landfill, and extracting data to prevent the original littering. As described in the profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, the site is already having a big impact: "The Digital Landfill, now home to more than 12,500 pieces of trash, is crowdsourced cleanup, and because the images are geo-tagged, Kirschner has been able to build a map that shows where each piece of trash was found. This kind of data could not only help raise litter awareness in urban areas but also alert the companies whose products often end up on the ground."

"I feel we have become so desensitized to our surroundings," Kirschner said. "People walk over broken glass or a coffee cup or a potato chip bag and just keep going. I've reached a point where I'm no longer OK with that."
...
On average, 100 photos are posted every day. "If 1 million people - which is a failure by social media standards - picked up one piece of trash per day, we could have a huge impact," he said.
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To Kathleen Russell, leader of Keep Dimond Clean, an Oakland neighborhood group that picks up 12,000 pounds of litter every year, Litterati is a step in the right direction: "The key that we were missing was the young people, and Litterati does that with social media."
...
Because the Digital Landfill creates a record of how much litter a user has disposed of, Kirschner imagines that Litterati could be a tangible way for participants to track the impact they've had. It has already changed his family's purchasing habits. The Kirschners buy in bulk, avoid single-use packaging and are planning to bring reusable containers to restaurants for take-out.
...
"If I were to turn (Litterati) off, 12,000 pieces of litter aren't on the ground, and I know two little kids who will never litter as long as they live," Kirschner said. "If that's the legacy of Litterati, then I'm OK with it. But I think there's an opportunity for it to be much more than that."

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Homeboy Industries: Putting Ex-Cons To Work

7/3/2013

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​G-Dog ("Nothing stops a bullet like a job"), a movie about Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J. and Homeboy Industries is now available on DVD.

You can also read an excellent in-depth article about Boyle from the May 2012 issue of Fast Company.

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Five Ways to Find God In All Things

7/2/2013

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PictureImage: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
The Ignatian Spirituality blog dotMagis offers five tips for finding God in all things: micro-awareness, journal, do something the "old-fashioned way," listen, and say "God is here."

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On Wasting Food

6/9/2013

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Image: StockUnlimited (1682709)
Pope Francis recently highlighted our "throwaway culture" where "food that is thrown away might as well have been stolen from the table of the poor, the hungry."

WRIInsights gives a number of statistics on how bad the waste actually is:
The world produces about 4 billion tons of food per year, or about 6 quadrillion calories. That’s a large amount, but what’s really shocking is that nearly one-quarter of these calories go uneaten.
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Pope Francis: Cult of Money Hurts the Common Good, Poor

5/19/2013

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PicturePhoto: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
Pope Francis forcefully denounced an idolatrous culture based on money, highlighting consumption, a "culture of disposal," the rich-poor gap, and lack of financial ethics.  The Catholic News Service reports:

Pope Francis called for global financial reform that respects human dignity, helps the poor, promotes the common good and allows states to regulate markets.

"Money has to serve, not to rule," he said in his strongest remarks yet as pope concerning the world's economic and financial crises.

A major reason behind the increase in social and economic woes worldwide "is in our relationship with money and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society," he told a group of diplomats May 16.

"We have created new idols" where the "golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal."

...
In his 10-minute scripted speech to new ambassadors, the pope highlighted the root causes of today's economic and social troubles, pointing to policies and actions that stem from a "gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption."

"We have begun this culture of disposal," he said, where "human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away."

The wealth of a minority "is increasing exponentially," while the income of the majority "is crumbling," he said.

This economic inequality is caused by "ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to states, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good."

The lack of adequate economic regulation or oversight means "a new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules," he said.

Ethical principles and policies of solidarity are "often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and economy," he said.

"Ethics, like solidarity, is a nuisance" and so they are rejected along with God, he added.

"These financiers, economists and politicians consider God to be unmanageable, even dangerous, because he calls man to his full realization and to independence from any kind of slavery."

Pope Francis called on the world's political and financial leaders to consider the words of St. John Chrysostom: "Not to share one's goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs."

The pope said he "loves everyone, rich and poor alike," but that as pope he "has the duty, in Christ's name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them."

He called for ethical financial reform that would "benefit everyone" and for the world of finance and economics to make people a priority and take into account the importance of ethics and solidarity.

Why shouldn't world leaders "turn to God to draw inspiration," the pope asked.

Looking to God and "his designs" would help create "a new political and economic mindset" that would bring economics and social concerns back together in a healthy and harmonious relationship, he said.
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Barber Give Haircuts To Homeless for Hugs

5/19/2013

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A retired 82-year-old barber has been offering free haircuts to the homeless at a Connecticut park for the past 25 years.  All he asks for is a hug in return.  He was originally motivated to start by a church sermon.

The Huffington Post reports:

His clients line up on park benches, some of them also turning out for free meals provided on Wednesdays by a local church. One by one they take a seat in a folding lawn chair above a car battery Cymerys uses to power his clippers.

As he finished a trim on one customer recently, a loud squeal came from the battery. He gathered the mobile shop, connected the clippers to his car and picked up where he left off.

"It really is love. I love these guys," Cymerys said. He paused and turned to his client in the chair, "You know I love you, right?"

"That's what it's all about," Cymerys said.
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Secret Agent L: Anonymous Acts of Kindness

5/17/2013

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Laura Miller writes about how God led her to create a movement of 2,000 agents performing anonymous acts of kindness across nine countries.  She reports on "missions" at the Secret Agent L blog.

And did I see any of this coming? Not at all. But it has become so very clear to me that this is my calling.

When I was in my teens, struggling with, well, those teen things, I did manage somehow to remember to pray. And my prayer was this: God, please use me for goodness. I’d grown up in a home with a family member who lives with a severe mental illness, and so I’d seen, experienced, and known quite deeply my fair sure of pain, of deep suffering, of suffering individuals. And it took a toll on my heart. But God, doing the slow, steady work He’d been doing for years, heard that daily—sometimes hourly—prayer. I simply wanted to be a force of good, to be a facilitator of peace and love and non-suffering.

And with the Secret Agent L Project, I am just that. God absolutely, 100% answered my prayer. And what’s equally amazing is that I see God in the Secret Agent L Project so clearly. When I receive emails from individuals who want to become Affiliated Agents, I see God working in their hearts, calling them to extend kindness to people they don’t know and will probably never even meet. When I am the featured speaker at events around the city, I see God in the attentive faces of the members of the audience who want to listen and experience kindness. When people approach me after speaking engagements and tell me how inspired they are by the Project, I see God moving through them and turning their hearts toward continued goodness and love and service to others.
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Gratitude: How It Can Backfire; At Work; During Hard Times; With Entitled Kids

5/16/2013

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The Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley offers these articles on gratitude:
  • Five Ways Giving Thanks Can Backfire: Most of the time, gratitude is good. But research finds that there are situations when "thank you" may be the wrong response.
  • Five Ways To Cultivate Gratitude At Work: Americans are less likely to say "thanks" on the job than anywhere else, which hurts productivity and happiness. That needs to change.
  • How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times: It's easy to feel grateful when life is good, says Robert Emmons. But when disaster strikes, gratitude is worth the effort.

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Top Five Regrets of the Dying

5/12/2013

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The prospect of death has a way of clarifying our values and priorities.  The Guardian reports on the book The Top Five Regrets of Dying, written by Australian nurse Bronnie Ware who gathered reflections from patients in their last twelve years of life.
Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."
The number one regret: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
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